Various people have pointed out that a part of the GNOME Foundation Trademark Usage Guidelines for Third Parties could be improved.
The Guidelines are at: http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/guidelines/ The section entitled "Use Proper Notice of Trademark" reads: > Identify GNOME Trademarks appropriately as a registered trademark > (using the circled-R symbol ®), or as an unregistered trademark > (using the TM symbol ) or an unregistered service mark (using > the SM symbol ℠). Check the list of GNOME Trademarks found > at http://foundation.gnome.org/licensing/ to verify the correct > symbol to use for each name. This section is quite broad, and is only modified by the somewhat vague "Fair Use" section. Unfortunately, if taken literally, it would prevent the use of the name GNOME in emails and package names without using the appropriate notice characters, as well as in other places where it would probably be a hassle to include. We don't want this, right? I'm proposing this additional language (which is based on text in other free software trademark policies) to be added in the same section, after that paragraph: > This requirement is waived in all contexts where such marks are not > normally included, such as email, online discussion, package names, > non-graphical advertisements (when permitted), and academic papers. > We encourage the use of the symbol whenever possible, but recognize > that many non-commercial and informal uses will omit it. We want to make sure that people can use GNOME software and talk about it freely without unreasonable restrictions. The aim is to adopt this amendment to the policy in two weeks if there are no objections. Public discussion here about it would be great, and folks can contact me privately too if they want to. thanks! karen _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
